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REQUIREMENT IN ENGLISH-III

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VENTULA, GEEVEE N. Ms. APRIL C. BALINON December 19, 2011

ELIZABETH BARRETT MOULTON-BROWNING (Biography)

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Browning was born March 6, 1806 in Durham, England. Her father, EdwardMoulton-Barrett, made most of his considerable fortune from Jamaican sugar plantations, and in 1809 he

bought Hope End, a 500-acre estate near the Malvern Hills. Elizabeth lived a privileged childhood, riding her

pony around the grounds, visiting other families in the neighborhood, and arranging family theatrica

productions with her eleven brothers and sisters. Although frail, she apparently had no health problems unti

1821, when Dr. Coker prescribed opium for a nervous disorder. Her mother died when she was 22, and critics

mark signs of this loss in Aurora Leigh.

Elizabeth, an accomplished child, had read a number of Shakespearian plays, parts of Pope's Homeric

translations, passages from Paradise Lost, and the histories of England, Greece, and Rome before the age of

ten. She was self-taught in almost every respect. During her teen years she read the principal Greek and Latin

authors and Dante's Inferno all texts in the original languages. Her voracious appetite for knowledge

compelled her to learn enough Hebrew to read the Old Testamentfrom beginning to end. Her enjoyment of

the works and subject matter of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft was later expressed by her

concern for human rights in her own letters and poems. By the age of twelve she had written an "epic" poem

consisting of four books of rhyming couplets. Barrett later referred to her first literary attempt as, "Pope's

Homer done over again, or rather undone."

In her early twenties Barrett befriended Hugh Stuart Boyd, a blind, middle-aged scholar, who rekindled

Barrett's interest in Greek studies. During their friendship Barrett absorbed an astonishing amount of Greek

literature Homer, Pindar, Aristophanes, etc. but after a few years Barrett's fondness for Boyd diminished.

Her intellectual fascination with the classics and metaphysics was balanced by a religious obsession

which she later described as "not the deep persuasion of the mild Christian but the wild visions of an

enthusiast. Her family attended services at the nearest Dissenting chapel, and Mr. Barrett was active in Bibleand Missionary societies.

From 1822 on, Elizabeth Barrett's interests tended more and more to the scholarly and literary. Mr.

Barrett's financial losses in the early 30s forced him to sell Hope End, and although never poor, the family

moved three times between 1832 and 1837, settling at 50 Wimpole Street in London. In 1838, The Seraphim

and Other Poems appeared, the first volume of Elizabeth's mature poetry to appear under her own name

That same year her health forced her to move to Torquay, on the Devonshire coast. Her favorite brother

Edward went along with her; his death by drowning later that year was a blow which prostrated her for

months and from which she never fully recovered. When she returned to Wimpole Street, she became an

invalid and a recluse, spending most of the next five years in her bedroom, seeing only one or two people

other than her immediate family.One of those people was John Kenyon, a wealthy and convivial friend of the arts. Her 1844 Poems made

her one of the most popular writers in the land, and inspired Robert Browning to write her, telling her how

much he loved her poems. Kenyon arranged for Browning to come see her in May 1845, and so began one of

the most famous courtships in literature. Six years his elder and an invalid, she could not believe that the

vigorous and worldly Browning really loved her as much as he professed to, and her doubts are expressed in

the Sonnets from the Portuguese which she wrote over the next two years. Love conquered all, however, and

Browning imitated his hero Shelley by spiriting his beloved off to Italy in August 1846. Since they were proper

Victorians, however, they got married a week beforehand.